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Issue No. 165 | 20 December 2002 |
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Terror Australis
Interview: Taking Stock Bad Boss: Pushing the Envelope Unions: The Year That Was Republic: Still Fighting International: Global Ties, Global Binds Politics: Turning Green Technology: Unions Online 2002 Industrial: The Past Is Before Us Economics: Market Insecurity Review: Shooting for Sanity Poetry: The PM's Christmas Message Culture: Zanger's Sounds of Summer
The Soapbox The Locker Room Bosswatch Predictions
 Refugee ReviewRepresentative RepresentativesMen Only?Dry ArgumentVale: Phil Berrigan
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Tool Shed TOOL OF THE YEAR: Pure Madness
****************** It is a sign of John Howard's political ascendency that he can afford to call at truce in his life-long battle with the union movement and refashion himself as a leader of national unity. If there is one upside to the manic politicking around Terror and Security it is that, for now, workers rights - or the diminution of the aforementioned - are off Howard's political radar. So attuned are current affairs to the Little Master's little, little mind that he may even punt on meeting his biographer's missus public call for paid maternity leave. Don't believe the hype, there is no way Pru would have got this far without a heads up. The workers have ceased to be the PM's enemy; the unions are neither inclined nor capable of doing much heavy lifting for the ALP and their members are fast becoming a key constituent group. Only this week, Howard called a ceasefire on Tony Abbott's union assault on the car industry. As Abbott primed the press for carnage, Howard opted for a Button-esque industry assistance package, proposed by a summit of union and industry types who recognised the zero-sum in industrial warfare. All Doug Cameron could do when the announcement was made was praise the PM and hope this enlightened policy become a blueprint for the rest of our manufacturing sector. All of which leaves Howard's political bovver boy looking sadly out of the main game in 2002. Sure, he had his Royal Commission to play with, but despite $65 million in our collective largesse, the spooks and dicks could find little more than an on-site Viagra racket and one man's sexual fantasies to make national headlines. The Cole Commission has not exposed a corrupt union movement, nor even a corrupt union; it has found spirited organising that sometimes crosses the boundaries into illegality; but that's with Abbott's own restrictive workplace laws. There is little that can be imagined emerging from the show-trial that will overshadow the war on Terror, or Iraq or Muslims, or whoever it is this sorry agenda mutates to target next. The only stage Abbott had to perform on in 2002 was in the little one, where he attempted to redefine work and Family by asserting that work was, well, family. But he stretched his analogy into dangerous territory, asserting that "a bad boss is like a bad father - notwithstanding all his faults you find he tends to do more good than harm. He may be a bad boss, but at least he's employing someone while he is in fact a boss." Before the howls of protests from victims of domestic violence had died down, he was redefining the work of the AIRC, no longer an umpire, now 'a neighbourhood' where the neighbours work things out together. He ranged the countryside looking for trouble, secure in his word view that the boss and the workers are just two punters, not a mismatch in the power relationship that is global capital's ultimate victory. He bagged the MUA members who refused to give their seats up to Ukranians when their ship became a Flag of Convenience. He persevered with his Holy Jihad to make it easier for bosses to sack their workers. He led the charge when unions sought to apply free market principles to union membership. And he huffed and he puffed, but he couldn't blow a single house down. Unions did not just hold the line in 2002. They moved forward. Cutting through decades of political blow-back to begin to assert a voice independent of the political wing that they created but which now seems hell-bent on disappearing up its own annals of history. Slimey Simey may have helped, but unions are accepting that the Party they created to improve workers rights, is now more interested in winning power than in exercising it. If Cunningham didn't show the tidal change, the Victorian election did when Tory Robert Doyle's last ditch desperation strategy to claim the ALP was in the union's pockets translated into his Party's largest loss in history. John Howard is too rat cunning for this trick. He has survived this long because he can read a poll. And his polls are the same as our's. People feel insecure in their work; they resent the big wages the corporates pay CEOs while slashing jobs. They now see unions as par of the solution, not part of the problem. Indeed, if anything, the debate has come full circle and punters now believe that unions have too little, not too much power. If the leadership tide may be passing Costello by, the entire political debate is bypassing the Monk and man who carried little but prejudice and bluster behind his substantial front. Even at week's end he was at it, leading the cheer squad for the right-wing 'think tank', the Institute of Public Affair's spurious assertions that enterprise bargaining were an unreasonable fetter on managers. Abbott went further than the ideological eggheads, calling for more Chris Corrigans to sign up as foot soldiers on an enemy whose reserves of weapons of mass destruction are grossly exaggerated by its political opponents. Which leaves the Mad Monk looking like one of the White House Hawks, determined for war in the face of all credible evidence. A greater Tool we've rarely seen.
Nominate a Tool!
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